Hot in Hellcat Canyon (2 page)

Enveloped in warm, easy Sherrie-ness, he did what he was told and settled himself beneath a window.

Britt was inclined to like people who flung things like “Masonic handshakes” into jokes. They were few and far between in a small town like Hellcat Canyon, though people here would surprise you. Everyone had their own reason for living here, often very personal or, even, like her own, as secret as the ingredients in a Glennburger. When she’d arrived she’d burrowed into the place like it was a blanket fort, deciding she’d found safety at last.

Though she was smart enough to know that safety was an illusion and that just calling it safety didn’t make it so.

He sat down, leaned back with a sigh, and stretched out those long legs as though he’d been walking on them for miles. His boots were dusty and a bit creased, but gorgeous in their simplicity. They looked as though he’d owned them forever and had probably cost more than the land the Misty Cat Cavern sat on.

He plucked up the menu wedged between the napkin holder and the little Tabasco bottle and fanned it open.

“What can I get for you?” she said briskly.

“Well, I think I’ve already had the something cold,” he said in a confiding, lowered voice to Britt, with a tilt of his head in the direction of Giorgio. “And I guess that would make you the something . . .”

He trailed off again at whatever he saw in her face.

“Well, I’ve been driving all night, and it feels like lunchtime, so I think I’ll have a beer,” he said. Sounding amused. “A Sierra Nevada. The Stout.”

“Sierra Nevada Stout.” She didn’t write it down.

“And I’ll try the hamburger. Excuse me, the Glennburger. With all of the ingredients, secret and otherwise. Medium rare.”

“Do you want cheese?” she asked.

“The cheese isn’t secret?”

“No. A bit enigmatic, maybe.”

He smiled at that, slowly, with genuine pleasure, and held her gaze a little longer than necessary. His eyes were a startling crystalline blue. She was reminded of rivers dashed into foam over rocks, and just like that, she was as breathless as if she’d dived into the icy snowmelt runoff of the Hellcat.

She mentally smacked away a surge of want as if it were a fanged predator. That kind of want hadn’t breached her defenses in a long, long time.

She steeled her gaze to impassivity.

His gaze turned quizzical and then faintly amused; then he dropped his eyes casually to the menu again. Which she was happy about, because then she could stare at him unguarded. His shirtsleeves were rolled nearly to his elbows. His forearms were tanned gold and corded and dusted in coppery hair. His fingers were long and elegant but the hands looked well used; an old pale scar traversed one. A musician, or a carpenter, maybe. A narrow streak of silver threaded up through his black hair where he’d pushed it behind his ear.

A circlet of tiny, neat black words was tattooed on his wrist: “It has been a beautiful fight.”

He closed the menu. “I’ll have cheddar on it, then. And I have another question.”

“Ask away!” she chirped.

He leaned casually back then, arms folded across his chest, and looked up at her for a moment without speaking. Then his mouth quirked wryly, as if to say,
Now, we both know chirpiness isn’t your real personality.

She gave him her blankly bright waitress face.

“Why is this place called the Misty Cat Cavern?” He said this with great gravity.

His voice was a visceral pleasure: deep, almost lazy, a bow drawn at leisure across a cello string. She thought she detected something Southern in the way he took his time with the vowels. It was a little too easy to imagine how he might sound right after he opened his eyes in the morning, when his sheets were still warm and the sun still just a suggestion of light at the top of Whiplash Peak.

“Well, from what I understand, the previous owner—Earl Holloway?—was falling-down drunk when he ordered the sign over the phone about thirty years ago. Apparently the guy on the other end swore Earl had said ‘Misty Cat Cavern’ and refused to make him a new one. Earl couldn’t afford another sign. He about threw a fit but he hung it. It’s the only neon sign on the whole street.”

“What did he mean to call it?”

“The Aristocrat Tavern.”

The stranger laughed, sounding surprised and genuinely delighted.

What a great laugh. She wanted to dive into that, too.

“I’ll be back with your beer,” she said, and spun like someone fleeing.

She scribbled his order on a tag and handed it over to Giorgio.

“Did you see his sweet little butt?” Sherrie murmured happily, as she smiled warmly at a swelling tide of incoming customers. “It was as neat as two eight balls sitting in his jeans.”

Behind her, Glenn, tying on his apron, gave a short laugh and shook his head and sighed. “Sherrie. Eight balls!” Thirty years of marriage and four kids later, Glenn still thought Sherrie hung the moon, and she sailed through life on the calm sea of his unconditional admiration. She was still capable of embarrassing him, though.

Giorgio was still glowering, his spatula clanging and scraping the grill with more fervor than usual. He sounded like a German industrial band. He already had a row of customers lined up on stools in front of him, eggs and muffin halves and sausage sizzling away side by side in a geometry he understood. He never got an order wrong.

Britt had indeed seen the stranger’s ass. “Eight balls” didn’t quite capture it metaphorically, but it was as perfect as anything she’d ever seen. A veritable Fabergé egg of an ass, rare and compelling. She could all too easily imagine sliding her hands down over it, but this had more to do with the entirety of him: the denim, the eyes, that barely noticeable silver streak in his hair, that whiff of sandalwood she’d caught, the leanness.

It had been years since thoughts that wanton had sneaked past her ramparts. Most men in town were too polite, or maybe too lazy, to continue attempting to scale the slippery wall of her reserve. Mostly that was okay with her.

She’d learned at a young age how dangerous it could be to see men in terms of their component parts. A man showed you who he was inside pretty quickly if you were willing to pay attention, but even then, sometimes it was too late.

“Last we see of him,” Giorgio predicted, gesturing with his chin. Which might be his longest sentence of the day.

God, she hoped so.

God, she hoped not.

“I don’t know. Glenn’s hamburgers really are the best,” Britt said. “He may not be able to help himself.”

Glenn beamed at her, his magnificent brush of a mustache twitching in pride.

She smiled back. She was reminded that making someone else happy was always the quickest, best way to get a little hit of happiness when she needed some.

She exhaled. Simplicity, contentment, love. She liked being near it. It was like a refreshing vast ocean she could dip a toe into, even though she’d grown afraid to wade on in.

CHAPTER 2

N
ot from here.

He could practically hear everyone drawing that conclusion with a single glance. He’d been born in an even smaller town, if you could even call that collection of shacks stuffed full of poor and bitter people a town, and he’d assessed people in just that way, too. He was an island amid the customers eddying around him and filling in all the tables while he devoured his hamburger, which was surprisingly as exceptional as advertised.

He glanced back and his view was butts on stools arrayed before the surly cook, mostly clad in Wranglers. Clearly a popular spot, the Misty Cat. He intercepted a few searching looks—a lingering one from a guy with a badge, to whom he nodded politely, a hard one from a good-looking red-faced blockhead, which he met with utter disinterest—and other kinder, more curious ones. Over the years he’d grown accustomed to every imaginable kind of stare, but no one here seemed to precisely recognize him. These days this was mostly a relief.

He’d learned over the years that some people just needed to classify the whole world as “better than me” or “not as good as me” or “just like me.”

He wasn’t one of them. He’d simply waited for his first opportunity to get the hell out of Sorry, Tennessee, and grabbed it in both hands. He hadn’t looked back.

As it turned out, however, you could never quite take the country out of the boy.

A lot had happened since then. A wedding. The army. Triumphs. Failures. A long stretch during which he’d done nothing much but suffer the whipsaws of his ego, drink, philosophize, read, fight, and seduce. Every last thing that had happened to him had somehow become useful.

And nobody with any sense fucked with him anymore.

While the diner watched him, he watched the waitress. Not overtly. More the way you’d rest tired eyes on something lovely, a bird flitting from tree to tree, maybe.

He left a big but not obnoxiously big tip, writing “This is for saying ‘enigmatic’ ” on the bill, and slipped out, daydreaming about her eyes. A clear pale green with tawny flecks floating in them, they made him think of panning for gold in Sierra Nevada rivers. He’d liked her delicate nerviness, the fine shoulder blades exposed by skinny straps of her camisole, the tiny tattoo on one of them he couldn’t quite make out because she’d been darting like a hummingbird among the customers. She had streaky gold-brown hair twisted and fastened up off her neck with a filigree barrette and a soft mouth at odds with that hard expression she’d clearly perfected in order to shut down men. He’d wanted to lay a hand on her arm and say,
Shhh, honey. It will all be okay
, but he didn’t know why, and he suspected she’d deck him if he did. He smiled. Wouldn’t be the first time a woman had decked him.

But there was a sweet jolt when their eyes met. A kind of recognition. He’d known a lot of women, in nearly every sense of that word. The jolt was pretty rare.

Bachman Turner Overdrive’s “Taking Care of Business” erupted from his phone. It was his agent’s ringtone, though lately he thought the funeral march might be more appropriate.

“And?” was how he answered it.

“They went with someone else for the
House of Cards
guest spot. It was close, though. They told me to tell you that.”

J. T. went silent. Damn.

He had just turned forty. He knew how to take a “no.”

He was just too much of a fighter to ever like it.

He knew better than to ask the next question, but that had seldom stopped him from doing anything. “Who’d they go with?”

Don’t say Franco Francone Don’t say Franco Francone Don’t say Franco Francone.

“Franco Francone.”

J. T. said nothing.

His agent laughed. “It’s a testament to your acting skill, J. T., that you didn’t say a word but I heard ‘fuck’ loud and clear.”

“Pardon my language,” J. T. said dryly.

“Ah, shake it off. They loved you and et cetera. It’s not a big deal. Francone doesn’t have your chops. He isn’t going to head up a cable series, for God’s sake, and
The Rush
is going to be fantastic. And other agently stuff I always say to you. Did I miss anything?”

“I think that about covers it. And yeah. I know
The Rush
will be great.”

“Where are you, by the way?”

“Hellcat Canyon, apparently. Truck started making noises. I got hungry. I stopped.”

“Where the hell is Hellcat Canyon? I thought California had two cities. L.A. and San Francisco.”

“California Gold Country. Where
The Rush
will be filmed. Had a few weeks before my schedule starts winding up again and it’s more or less on the way to Napa. Thought I’d get a sense of the place, maybe find a place to stay. Gorgeous here,” he said absently. “Long way from L.A.”

He didn’t tell Al he’d got in the truck last night and just started driving because waiting on news of
Last Call in Purgatory
was going to make him crazy and he couldn’t stay cooped up in a house. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d cared this much about a role.

He didn’t ask about it. If there was news, Al would tell him.

“All right, then. If you can’t be good, be newsworthy,” Al said dryly. “See you at Nicasio’s wedding in Napa?”

“Yeah. Thanks, Al.” J. T. was supposed to give a toast there, and for many reasons, he still had no idea what he was going to say.

“You bet, J. T.”

J. T. ended the call and was just about to stuff his phone back into his pocket when a text chimed in.

He sighed gustily. He knew exactly who it was from.

Better Luck Next Time, McCord.

Franco must have fist-pumped when he thought of that. It was a brilliantly horrible thing to say for a lot of reasons. J. T. almost laughed.

He did what he always did whenever Franco sent him a text about anything.

He sent back a photo of one of his Emmys.

It made Franco
nuts
.

It was just one of the things J. T. had that Franco claimed J. T. had stolen from him.

Franco was wrong on every count, of course. But it wasn’t as though J. T. was entirely innocent.

He finally put his phone away.

He got a few feet closer to his truck and paused to crouch and scratch a black-and-white cat drowsing in front of a florist’s shop.

It arched and stretched to greet him, then ecstatically rotated its head so he could reach under its chin.

A little girl, nine, ten years old, peachy skinned, hair bound in two ruthlessly symmetrical strawberry-blonde braids, pushed open the door of the shop and paused to stare at him.

“Isn’t my cat soft? His name is Peace and Love.”

“Peace and Love, huh? Why Peace and Love?”

“Because he has a paisley on his side.”

“So he does.” J. T. scratched the black paisley shape.

“And my grandma is kind of a hippie and she wishes my mama was one, too. She thinks my mama needs to loosen up.”

“What’s a hippie?” he asked gravely and wholly mischievously.

“Oh, you know, they have long hair and their houses smell good. It’s the sense.”